Many thanks, first of all, to all those who have contributed such excellent posts to a lively debate here at Heretic TOC in response to last week’s blog by the Virtuous Pedophiles. So, what are we left with after the blog itself plus some 7,000 words of comment? I think it will be a useful exercise for me not so much to sum up all this diverse input as to single out a few key themes. In doing so, I am also taking into account a further 3,000 words of email debate, to which I was privy, initiated by psychologist Prof. J. Michael Bailey earlier this month. This too was mainly an encounter between the same VPs and a couple of the heretical contributors here.
Because I aim to encourage thought, I do not propose to dwell overlong on the weaker aspects of the VP contribution, which heretics ably dissected. The strengths – and there were good points – are where we need to focus.
Briefly, then, let us get the downside out of the way first. Heretics pointed out a contradiction in the VP position. The VPs’ message to the non-MAP public is that adult-minor sexual contacts are always wrong; they tell us here, too, that in their minds and hearts they foreswear any other view. But they also say “under certain circumstances, we could reconsider”. Sugarboy’s response was “it seems that you have no ideals to fight for other than those that meet the majority’s approval. In other words, you make a virtue of necessity.”
Virtue or not, necessity will prevail by definition; accommodating to it is thus wise, not a weakness in itself. Ethan reminded us of a famous prayer by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr:
God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Wise words indeed; but they are all too readily seized upon as a pat excuse for complacent passivity. It is significant that Ethan did not mention these words from the same prayer:
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right
The VPs’ hidden agenda, I suggest, is the same: we should leave the heavy lifting to God, whose conspicuous absence from the affairs of man has always seemed, to a non-believer like me, a huge embarrassment for the faithful. Be that as it may. My quarrel here is not with God, or believers, but with those who lack the stomach to fight for change and the vision to see possibilities for it – and indeed its necessity. I will come to those possibilities in due course.
I will just add here that the most necessary and urgent aspect of change is to halt the rapid criminalisation of children as sex offenders, an issue to which the VPs seem callously indifferent. They casually say VPs “have no problem with children experimenting sexually with similarly aged peers”. But if they had an ounce of compassion and social concern beyond the narrow horizon of saving their own skins they would have a problem with it, the problem being that such “experimental” encounters are becoming ever more subject to oppressive surveillance and eradication measures. Even at kindergarten, sexual encounters between kids these days are said to be “perpetrated” by a child who is an “abuser”, as noted in an earlier blog, Being a predator is child’s play. There is no sex play for kids any more. The VPs react to this burgeoning new victim narrative with a shrug of indifference: not our problem! Leave it to the experts!
Likewise, they very dangerously leave therapy for distressed MAPs in the hands of presumed experts without apparently asking any of the right questions or insisting on proper standards. This would make a blog on its own. At this point I would just like to thank Gary Gibson from the therapy outfit www.iLoveChildren.us for turning up here. Gary, I may at some point want to ask you some of the questions the VPs are failing to deal with.
For the moment, I will just note the irony embedded in Niebuhr’s modern (20th century) Christian conservatism: if the early Christians had “wisely” weighed up the odds of their success in the days when they were being fed to the lions, they would certainly have given up!
The real weakness in VP’s position is making a virtue not of true necessity, which makes sense, but of a false “necessity”, in which the status quo is pusillanimously presented as inevitable. They manage to justify this lack of animation by keeping their eyes squeezed shut in order to block out the evidence that would support fighting for radical change. Thus, in order to make a virtue of “necessity” they must first make a virtue of ignorance! Ethan is quite explicit about it, saying “we bring no special knowledge to the table” about what is best for children. He shamelessly abdicates responsibility for informing himself on the subject, preferring to leave it all to the experts. While there is such a thing as genuine expertise in developmental psychology and so forth, should we be wholly reliant upon it? Based on the track record of scientists, who not so long ago were telling us that masturbation makes you go mad and that criminality can be detected from the shape of our heads (and who now insist paedophiles are on average a bit dim) this is clearly foolish.
This proudly proclaimed ignorance does not, however, inhibit the VPs from making unsupported assertions, such as “Children do not benefit from sex with adults, even if no harm is done.” On the contrary, it enables the VPs to do so with confidence, safe in the knowledge (their vestigial, minuscule bit of knowledge!) that their ignorance is invincible: they know that if they are confronted with evidence they can just stick their fingers in their ears and sing “La, la, la, can’t hear you. The experts know best. La, la la.”
This is not the time to go into detailed evidence showing that even in contemporary circumstances some children do benefit a great deal from sexual relationships with adults, or to expand on the positive possibilities that would attend a more liberated social vision. I will confine myself to mentioning that some such evidence was presented by T. Rivas, as discussed on Heretic TOC in A positive sighting of 118 black swans. I should also take this opportunity to plug a 90-page chapter in a new book in which a vast amount of evidence is presented on the positive side of man-boy sexual relationships. This is a long-censored paper with multiple perspectives on pederasty, by Bruce Rind: hence its appearance in a book called Censoring Sex Research. I hope to be blogging about this book and a related conference shortly.
Rind, significantly, is quoted out of context by Nick, as Ovid noted, in a fallacious bid to distance the fabled psychologist from claims that adult-child sex might be beneficial. This too is a product of ignorance – or, at least, I will charitably assume it arose from ignorance on Nick’s part rather than mendacity.
If making virtues of non-virtuous things (“necessity” and ignorance) are salient VP weaknesses, what about the strengths of their analysis? I believe they are correct in their claim that a measure of acceptance, in some circles at least, could be gained by those who loudly proclaim their adherence to mainstream moral opinions. As Sean noted, though:
Unfortunately, this amounts to a significant contraction of what Noam Chomsky has called ‘the bounds of thinkable thought’. Such thought policing has seldom brought positive changes to society and there’s no reason to think it will bring any to the predicament of paedophiles in the 21st C. It’s apparent that the worthy goal of ‘child protection’ readily devolves into a punitive, repressive, sex negative ideology that criminalizes and pathologizes not just sexual assault but normal childhood sexuality and sexual rehearsal. In fact, there is reason to believe that many ‘child protection’ initiatives are stalking horses for even more sinister authoritarian agendas, such as state assaults on free speech and increased domestic surveillance.
But the VPs have a significant counter-narrative. In an email, Ethan paints a rosy, even panglossian, picture of modern life compared to the past, the strength of his account lying in its element of truth. He celebrates the empowerment of women, the decoupling of sex and reproduction thanks to effective contraception, and intolerance of sex crimes such as date rape. As for children in earlier societies, they were “routinely abused physically and psychologically. In this context, unwanted sexual activity with adults might have seemed minor.” He is right to present a challenge to the idea of lost golden ages in which everyone could frolic freely together in some bucolic paradise of carefree intimacy. In most times and places life has been much harsher than it is for most of us today, both in the struggle for sheer survival and in the often brutal customs bred by such struggle. Ethan’s account, indeed, came dangerously near to being persuasive, as though – heaven forfend! – it might be based on something other than pure ignorance! Were it not for the fact that he appears never to read anything (despite having a PhD in psychology from one of the world’s leading universities), I might suspect he had been glancing at the odd page by Lloyd deMause, the “psychohistorian” who has presented history as a series of eras, each slightly less bleak for children than the last, culminating in our present relatively caring times. This simplistically progressive Mausian view has been criticised as grounded in a highly selective history of child abuse rather than a history of childhood. But I would not expect Ethan to have read enough to discover that much!
Peter Loudon, in reply, also astutely observed a fallacy in Ethan’s view:
One fallacy we all fall for is to regard the place we are now (in history) as being the place everything in the past was aiming for. The fact that we keep moving on means that this is not correct, and could apply to your assessment of where we currently stand…The price we have paid for security, immunity from dying in war, etc. is a succession of generations of people who have neither imagination nor initiative, and have traded life for obesity and a PlayStation. Everyone is held hostage to the threat of the paedophile and so no longer does anything outside or physical. Huge numbers of children suffer from ADHD.
The VPs have two even stronger points though. Firstly, they say radical activism by self-declared MAPs is doomed: MAP action on behalf of children, especially, will inevitably be discredited as self-interested. Discreet work for youth under some other designation than MAP would be more helpful, they say. I agree! Personally, having long been upfront as a MAP, such an option would not be open to me. Does that mean I would do well just to shut up? In terms of outreach to the wider public, maybe so. I do see a continuing public education role, however, for Heretic TOC and any other forums with a MAP presence which present the issues in a rational, informative and morally defensible way.
Ponder this: several times in Heretic TOC’s one-year history, the daily hit-rate has shot up massively for a while, by many hundreds, thanks to being mentioned in a hostile way on sites such as David Icke’s. Many of these people can be expected to have rummaged around the website in the expectation of being outraged. One might suppose these potentially very angry visitors would do their damnedest to set the comments pages alight with their flaming. Well, guess what? They don’t! I have not been flamed or trolled even once in 2013 so far as I can recall. Yes, they know that on a moderated site the flame would be trashed, but even so… My theory is that thousands of people go away less angry than they expected to be, and perhaps even a bit impressed. Am I wrong? If so, tell me why.
The VPs second strong point is that radical MAP activists have been reduced to talking among ourselves. This, too, is largely true. But, as my last point suggests, this does not necessarily make the exercise useless. Our actions are very, very constrained by the law and by public opinion. That being the case, we need to think, and websites such as this enable us to do so. Speaking for myself, I am too old and clapped out to lead any sort of revolution, for which in any case I lack the necessary attributes: I am more interested in “calling it as I see it” than doing all the tough alliance-building and strategy stuff that more political types do. But that need not stop younger people here from finding an opportunity to think things through and perhaps be inspired to great works.
Finally, I would point out that society is changing so quickly that none of us can really grasp how things will pan out. The western developed world has within a few decades undergone not one but several cultural revolutions, including non-marital partnerships, gay liberation and the empowerment of women. The new electronic technologies are now shifting things massively again: every kind of pornography except child porn has become ubiquitous, and is making a big impact – some of it good, some perhaps not – on the sexual sophistication of kids from late pre-puberty onwards. In this feverish climate it is by no means certain that the present panicky reaction of the conservatives, with their ever greater emphasis on surveillance and suppression, can hold the line. Children exploring and copying what they see, especially as they get into their second decade, may have a profound influence: we already have sexting and sexy selfies, and that’s only the start of it. In years to come it may prove technically impossible to hide child porn from most kids, too, including its more pleasantly erotic manifestations, in which the participants are seen to be enthusiastically engaged. Where would that take us? In those circumstances the currently dominant abuse narrative would suffer sudden catastrophic collapse, even though it now seems so solid.
It would be helpful, to put it mildly, for radical MAPs rather than VPs to be visible in the midst of such an eventuality, and for them to seize the day, in order to build a newly positive narrative. For such possibilities we need to be prepared.
I think…we with “radical” ideas [though, I think of them as practical ideas], write and share from ourselves for a wide variety of reasons.
Maybe most of us, or all of us, will be forgotten…and nothing will come from all of this…
…You don’t do this sort of thing, because you expect to be liked by most people…On the contrary…If you are like me, then you do it as a matter of personal conscience…You’re not out here to be celebrated…You put yourself out here, on the chance that you can make some form of positive change in the world…even if that only means, offering something to a fellow “pedophile” [young or old], who is in the process of trying to work their way through personal issues, and find themselves in this turbulent world.
I don’t care in the least, if I am ever looked upon as some form of hero, or a major success…Actually, I am lying about that a bit, and to those out there who have given me warm and wonderful responses and sometimes even praise…I love you!…and don’t wish to diminish what kind things you have offered back to me…But if I never got any responses at all, from anything I have ever done…I would still be doing the various things that I do [whatever they happen to be, at the time]…because I find value in the process and journey, itself.
…I am just glad to see, some people do join me along the way…And I have been told enough times by some, that they do find value in what I do.
To my mind…VP is welcome to stake out a public face…but in the trenches, we still have a lot of work to do…Likely, most of our kind don’t even know of research and studies that support us…Most have likely never even conceived of a personal freedom for themselves…Most are likely accepting of the politically correct narrative. As a consequence, the majority of us are never there, when us relative few have reached that point of persona paradigm shift…where we can no longer accept things as they are, and start chomping at the bit to make a change in the world. We need our numbers…We need our army…a union that can seriously extract accountability and concession, out of the rest of our species.
Until that happens…there can be all sorts of wonderful things, done amongst our ranks…indeed, there is a wealth of great work our kind already brings to the table…but it won’t have anything behind it, which makes those who have “clubbed us over the head”, sincerely regretful for having done such an uncivilized injustice.
I applaud VP, for just being out there and exercising their voices…which is one of the biggest hurdles facing the majority of us…getting past the reluctance and fear to speak and address the public…But it should not be forgotten, that VP is still in the same situation as the rest of us…and has limited horizons…VP has just plotted off, into a different direction from many of us. If they can ultimately make substantive progression that benefits children, teens and “pedophiles” alike…good on them.
Me?…I am too heavily invested in what I have done, to just drop everything and follow a contrary path.
I’ve been told by more than one person [though not many]…that I more less echo the positions of NAMBLA, and that NAMBLAs’ model is a failure…or worse still, that it has done damage to us. Does this make what I do bad?…Should I just stop, and go silent?…Maybe resurface under an entirely different persona, and stow away my personal body of work, in preference of starting with a clean slate and taking a stab at something else?…
…Sometimes, bearing the old torch of community pride, really is one of the most fundamental needs to be filled, within our communities and amongst our kind.
Trite pep talk?…or wisdom for the ages?…I’ll let the reader decide…But I know what I put value in, here.
Ethan: “the source of harm […] doesn’t matter for the narrow question of whether pedophiles should engage in sexual activity with children.”
I agree with you on this. Given the zeitgeist I think the risk of any activity involving children that could offend in the eyes of the reigning jurisdiction must be considered an actual wrong against the child.
But I’ve always maintained a staunch agnosticism on this question of ‘contact’ because I simply do not believe a categorical statement can be made about it, in terms of either harm or ethics, and also because I don’t see how a benign act can be reframed as a harmful act purely on the basis of its being sexual, and can conceive of benign acts that could have a sexual component.
I call it agnosticism because the question is underdetermined and I don’t know how it could be answered. This makes the question itself moot and largely irrelevant to the broader question of how to live as a minor attracted adult.
I don’t engage any conduct that fits this vexed category and I don’t see any reason to state my views on it unless asked. If asked, I’m honest about what I think, even when that causes me difficulties. In general, people respect my honesty and even when they disagree strongly, they don’t seem to think less of me or revoke their trust in me because of what I’ve said.
If I were to take the relatively small step made by VP and assert that ‘contact’ is always and forever wrong, I would be lying. In talking to people, I would be saying something I don’t believe and so being less than transparent. Therefore I think it’s better to leave this question open. Answering it with palatable, market oriented assertions of orthodoxy, tailored specifically to gain trust and acceptance, seems to me much more problematic than my own response.
What’s more, I think there are MAPs who think like me and feel alienated by VP’s dogmatic position, and that just seems to limit the appeal of what might otherwise be a useful resource for people struggling to integrate minor attraction in their own lives.
[TOC adds: Please, no more posts on this thread, Sean. I have said the same to Ethan, who has indicated that he would welcome a private dialogue with you by email. So let me know if you would be interested.]
When I took a course on social research while studying for my MSW, I had a professor who was fond of saying “a difference, to be a difference, has to make a difference.” Essentially the position of VPs is that whether harm to the child comes from the supposed intrinsic harm of intergenerational sexual relations or whether it is a consequence of societal reactions and attitudes makes no difference. In either case the child is harmed. If we limit our focus to a situation where two consensual partners have been discovered in an illegal relationship, there is a grain of truth in this, which is why I would, in general, encourage people who are attracted to minors to show some discretion. Indeed society’s response is harmful to both the adult and the child. And one can argue that by exposing the child to the brutal reaction of a society in the throes of a sexual hysteria, the adult shares in the guilt. But it does not follow from this very narrow reading of the matter that it makes no difference.
First and foremost, where, in the VP’s rhetoric is the insistence that society as a whole, and the members of the mental health profession in particular, act in a responsible manner? When society and the individual come into conflict we somehow always assume that society has the high ground. As I argue in my article, this assumption is not warranted.
Whether harm is intrinsic to all intergenerational activities, regardless of whether they are mutually desired, is of central significance. Let me briefly suggest some of the differences that this difference does indeed make.
If there is little or no intrinsic harm in mutually desired sexual activities then it is the current sex abuse panic itself that is centrally responsible for the destruction of the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings who have done no harm to anyone. First among these victims of society’s hysteria are large numbers of people who were caught in the Satanic abuse and recovered memory debacle, and who, by anyone’s standards, are innocent. Then we have the family members of all the sex offenders, who suffer terribly. Then there are the younger members of the relationships who are traumatized by the guilt of putting someone they may have loved in prison for life. In addition these “victims” are taught that their own experience of the relationship is not in fact what happened – a confusing matter at best. Then we have the child “offenders” who are subjected to the inexcusably crass and brutal techniques used in the programs to which they are condemned. Should we also mention the ways in which this panic has distorted child/adult relations in society across the board – where everyone is afraid to hug a child, or to show any real affection to one? Or the loss of freedom for children who are infantilized, over-supervised and micromanaged for fear of their encountering the child rapist – an event about as likely as being hit by lightning. Also we should not forget the many teen-agers who almost certainly are committing suicide every day because they discover they are attracted to younger children and fear the hatred and demonization of society. And of course I have not even mentioned the “sex offenders” themselves, who are on a daily basis subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment. Those people, after all, don’t count. They are our throwaways.
These consequences follow not from the behavior or the irresponsibility of minor attracted adults who act on their impulses, but from society’s moral panic. Whether the core cause of this suffering is intrinsic or induced by the irrationality of society is, in fact, a difference that makes a difference.
VP doesn’t claim that the source of harm doesn’t matter, we just feel it doesn’t matter for the narrow question of whether pedophiles should engage in sexual activity with children.
I agree with you on most of the bad effects of the panic — and I agree passionately, not just in passing. But we differ on how to change things. Given the common public perception that we all enjoy watching children suffer as we rape them — or are deterred only by legal consequences were we to get caught — what message should we be emphasizing? Given that view, saying that adult-child sex would be fine if society didn’t object comes across as a crazy attempt to get permission to rape children without legal consequences. I know that’s not at all what you mean. But to hope to change the people who are behind the hysteria, you have to understand them. Some of us (roughly, VP members) accept that adult-child sexual activity is wrong, and either think this should not change or relegate this to an irrelevant future possibility. This is news to lots of people, as our media attention suggests. A small first step in dismantling the panic is to see pedophiles as human beings, not crazy monsters. If we achieved that step and many others, you could get to a point where society might consider your idea that adult-child sexual activity can be OK. I think they will stay firmly opposed to it, but you can’t even begin to get a hearing for your case until other changes take place.
‘But to hope to change the people who are behind the hysteria, you have to understand them.’ For my part, I understand ‘the people’ only too well. From bitter experience, such people are overwhelmingly phobic, that is to say they display critical and hostile behavior that manifests itself as discrimination and violence towards those that happen to have sexual orientations that are non-heterosexual.
For a gay man to say: ‘I am a virtuous homosexual because I believe that same-sex sexual activity is wrong, and there exist many other homosexual men just like me’ in an attempt to meet ‘the people’ halfway, is disingenuous. VP promotes a similar deceit to appease.
This reply is for feinmanO, who says:
“For my part, I understand ‘the people’ only too well. From bitter experience, such people are overwhelmingly phobic, that is to say they display critical and hostile behavior that manifests itself as discrimination and violence towards those that happen to have sexual orientations that are non-heterosexual.”
—
I would promote that you explore the metas of why people do as they do and in what context. Many people, for instance, hide who they really are and what they really think, in the context of a society that COERCES uniformity.
There is also the reality that many people are ENCOURAGED to let out their own poisons on the popularized scapegoat. If this were a liberated society, we’d see their actions coming across very very differently. And the example that comes to mind can be possibly compared with gays before they were accepted/tolerated (and how many DID NOT dare come out into the open and fight) and AFTER they were given such privilege of social acceptance. The two realities are stark in their differences. Which sheds light on the realities of the meta game that most Westernized societies play.
Dissent welcome!
I think the issue which bugs me the most is this controversy is that somehow this normative question arises about “how pedophiles ought to be / behave”. Why are we a special case? Why must pedophiles be some kind of category of people who need special kind of awareness one way or the other. Every kind of categorization would come with its on set of flaws. VP can’t speak for everyone of us. I myself certainly don’t want to be represented by them – and neither do i want to be represented by any other group. I speak for myself as an individual. Being pedophile myself is an irrelevant side-story much like my hair-color.
And to be perfectly honest – i don’t really like admitting this – i am kind of jealous of how much respect and popularity you gained (albeit completely for the wrong reasons in my opinion).
But your reactions to society do not astonish me anymore. We might share pedophilia – but does this make us so similar? Our worldviews and coping with society is different because we are individuals afterall. We just find ourselves in the same situation and we all go our own different ways from there.
I think one primary goal would be to convey that we are all different and diverse like heterosexuals, homosexuals and others alike – basically human.
There are no “virtuous heterosexuals”, who subscribe to some kind of behavioral belief-system towards women. Everybody would recognize how silly and pretentious this notion would be.
If someone would ask me how i would characterize myself – the word “pedophilia” would not be in it. it is just one of my traits i happen to have as a human being. One of the many reasons i tell nobody about this, is because if i ever mention it, henceforth everybody would see me through the lense of their very own preconceptions about “pedophilia”. Prejudice from the media and society mostly. VP ist just one other lense not representing me.
Of course i must admit some hypocrisy on my part, because i identify myself as a girllover and sometimes i seem to speak “for us” or as some kind of authority of girllovers, which i am not. But i see an important distiction here. While the terms girllover or boylover arose from a movement, to which anybody can freely subscribe to or decline.
The term “pedophile” is a much more broad and public definition. Whenever the media portraits someone as speaking for “pedophiles” or showing someone while giving the impression this individual somehow represents pedophiles as a whole, i really could go crazy. Face it. Media coverage about VP would not any different. As in any other case, it would convey an incomplete, limited and presumptuous impression of the worlds pedophile population.
So please stop… stop spreading and confirming your very own beliefs and misconceptions and generalizing them upon “pedophiles” as a whole. Keep it to yourselves.
And of course i’d like to include myself and everyone else in this.
…also, I would be the last person to suggest that great writers are necessarily nice people. I was simply illustrating the possibility that paedophilia might come with a hightened awareness of and interest in children, and that with intelligence and creativity, this interest might develop into impressive insight.
The gist of your response seems to be a grudging acceptance of potential benefits of paedophilia followed closely with portentious warnings about inevitable down sides. To me this reads like the usual line of prejudice and bigotry rather than an insider advocating for emancipation.
Being comfortable with one’s feelings, sexual and otherwise, and being accepting of one’s peculiarities, normative or otherwise, is a good step toward self knowledge and leading a mindful, empathetic and ethical life. The relentless pathologizing and crucifying of paedophiles is contributing significantly to the likelihood that they will express their feelings in compulsive and damaging ways. People in pain reach for whatever they think might soothe their pain, and personal pain has a way of obscuring the pain of others.
In contrast, casting a love for and attraction to children in a positive light allows these feelings to be expressed in a positive way and, in general, I support any project that does that. Specific views on sexual conduct with children aren’t a deal breaker for me either way, so long as the overall message is positive and prosocial.
..the above is meant to be a reply to the original post, not to mr p.
The subject of sexual rehearsal in children, with which this post begins, begs the question of what subjects are (or ought to be) of particular relevance or concern to MAPs in the context of seeking public understanding and acceptance of their own feelings and conduct. It’s heard often enough that perhaps someone should argue for the sexual rights of children, but that paedophiles are not the people to do it because it simply seems insincere and self serving.
This reminds me of the rebuke that paedophiles have no special insight into children’s nature in general, or that any outrage or heartbreak that a paedophile might feel on seeing a child mistreated, misunderstood or ignored is a manifestation of his sick sexual yearnings, not of any finer sensibility. Ironically, a bizarre cartoon of paedophilia sometimes aired by the media refers to the praeternatural ability of paeodphiles to read children’s minds and manipulate their thoughts. This is related to the ’emotional congruence’ theorized by the sexual abuse industry and presented as a threat rather than a benign trait.
I don’t assume that paedophiles always have children’s best interests at heart and I realise that among paedophiles as in any other group there exist callous sociopaths and selfish ignoramuses. However, I do believe that the organic phenomena that underlie paedophilia predispose to an acute awareness of children and an ability to develop deep insights into their nature and into childhood experience. This is why there are so many paedophiles among the giants of children’s literature.
I think this question of the relevance of actual children to these debates over paedophilia is very important. Most paedophiles want to be involved with children, as friends and mentors and most are far less bothered by society’s prohibition of sexual conduct than is commonly assumed. At it’s best, the primary instinct is to cherish and nurture, not to exploit and molest. It’s as natural for most paedophiles to do this as it is for most parents to perform that role with love and attention.
So on the one hand it’s possible to debate the position of paedophiles in society in isolation, as a marginalized and stigmatized minority, and to be preoccupied with that. But on the other, it’s important not to forget what’s at the eye of this vortex of public concern: children themselves.
I’m in favour of expressing concern for and interest in children consciously and explicitly, and of thinking through the various consequences of doing this. I don’t believe that paedophilia is a ‘private’ matter, to be ‘managed’ alone and isolated behind the bedroom door, through fantasy and masturbation or perhaps through denial and abstinence. Paedophilia isn’t a sexual fetish, it’s a social trait. Resolution of the current impasse must proceed in a manner that never fails to consider the ongoing involvement of children themselves in paedophile’s lives. In this I prefer Tom’s radicalism to VP’s accommodationism.
But personally, I’m less interested in the question of sexual conduct with children than I am in the question of how to contribute positively to their lives and, especially, how to live my life in a manner that allows me to do this through actual friendship with and love for actual children. Sex is an important aspect of life and the defense of children’s sexual rights is important too, but the limits of ethical adult conduct with children are, for me, more a question of honesty, transparency and respect for social norms than they are a question of what might and might not cause harm.
Not sure if you will approve this, Tom, but it does cover some new ground.
“paedophiles are not the people to do it because it simply seems insincere and self serving. … This reminds me of the rebuke…”
The one situation may remind you of the other, but they still need to be considered separately. As long as there is a very strong correlation between those who argue for the sexual rights of children (to have sex not with each other but, most notably, adults) and the desire (at least in principle) to have sex with children, it’s a powerful argument.
“… that paedophiles have no special insight into children’s nature in general,”
To simplify things, let’s for the moment restrict this to pedophiles who are not engaging in sexual activity with the kids. One thing that’s frustrating in representing Virtuous Pedophiles here is that people pile onto our real positions those of the most intolerant parts of society. I accept that pedophiles may often have a deeper insight into the subjective experience of children than the average person. I certainly agree that society’s dismissing this as just a result of sickness is vile prejudice. The child’s subjective experience is not the same as what is best for a child, though. A number of pedophiles have confided to me that they worry that if/when given responsibility for a child, the danger is they will spoil them rotten. Pedophiles often get to be like the divorced father who can shower the kid with treats and fun trips, while the custodial mother is stuck with fighting battles about homework and rules and teaching respect for others, etc. And real parents deal with the strains of doing those things while leading a life that is often very stressed. Yet of course some parents do a really poor job and a pedophile can sometimes step in and make a big difference with the nitty-gritty of life as well as the fun parts. These cases are where the bulk of reports come where adults reminisce fondly about pedophile relationships when they were young. But there are an awful lot of other cases too. And countervailing the “abuse narrative” in biasing self-reports, there are effects related to “every experience has taught me something and made me stronger” and a generally positive attitude towards life.
“an acute awareness of children … is why there are so many paedophiles among the giants of children’s literature”.
True, but once again it’s not clear how that translates to real life. I am convinced J. D. Salinger was a pedophile, having read a memoir by his daughter and one by his onetime lover Joyce Maynard, but he wrote good books indeed. However, in his personal life he was a disaster to the girls and women in his life. It did not involve any sexual abuse, to my knowledge, but there are many other ways to be a disaster. I think there was a close relationship between the two.
I have no problem in principle with pedophiles being involved in children’s lives as long as it’s celibate, and have no doubt they often improve their lives. I myself have been a “favorite grown-up” to a number of children when my own were younger. I think it’s best if they remain closeted, and they can be one type of grown-up who is especially good with kids. Maybe some day they could be “out” and celibate and accepted by parents, but I think that it’s a long way off.
There are worries in practice today, however. As you note, pedophiles differ. Overrepresented online in discussions like these are those who are articulate and good. Ordinary men engage in very creative rationalizations to work their way into women’s pants, and I think that beyond the rare sociopaths there is an added danger of an average pedophile doing the same thing, since children are not as wise as grown-ups to pick up on manipulations. And whether Rind was able to measure it with worse life outcomes or not, sex which is consented to under false pretenses is wrong.
This is not to say that pedophiles need to be ashamed of their identity and their attractions. VP does not encourage that.
I am more convinced than ever of the argument I made before: if you want to work for children’s rights, do it under some identity other than as a pedophile. It will be best for everyone.
Sometimes kids really, really need the fun side, especially when the parents are overly pushy and achievement oriented. Macaulay Culkin was a case in point. His time with boy-lover Michael Jackson was exceedingly well spent. But this is not to say that paeds cannot do serious too. As Fred Berlin emphasised in a recent excellent lecture, one’s sexual orientation as a MAP says little or nothing — well, he said nothing, actually — about one’s personality and character. Generally, though, I think we are better placed to take on a different role than that of parent, but one that can often be positive and complementary rather than oppositional.
Thanks for the comments Ethan.
In relation to the “danger is they will spoil them rotten”, I guess the flip side to that is the pain of watching parents who utterly fail to recognize who their child is and what she needs from them.
And the danger of sweet talking paedophiles weazeling their way into children’s pants reflects the mythology that drives public opinion rather than the nature of paedophilic desire. Sure the news media is filled with tales of exploitation, molestation and abuse, but you know what, they are in the news because they are news and because they sell papers, not because they are typical.
Love is an emotion that motivates an adult to protect a child, not to hurt her.
We both agree that some pedophiles are sensitive, well-intentioned, and have good self-control and that there are others, but we disagree about how many there are of each. Do you have any data to back up your contention that the latter are rare? You have this idea of child love, and I have no doubt that many in online communities share the ideal. And it’s fine to identify with that subgroup as a matter of pride. But I think lots of other pedophiles don’t really qualify but would frame themselves that way.
Tom quotes Fred Berlin as saying pedophiles have the same range of personalities as anyone else, and when I think about the different attitudes ordinary men have towards women, I see a lot of sleaze along with lots of sensitive goodwill. Society may see nothing but slimy pedophiles, and you may see very few of them, but the truth must be in the middle. Sleazy pedophiles combined with children (who typically aren’t street wise) are a recipe for lots of encounters without properly informed consent (by anyone’s definition).
Ethan, to my eyes, sleaze is the exact flip side of puritanism. Sleaze fails to flourish where sexual life is valued. My libertarianism is a stance against the sleaze/puritan dyad.
Also, I don’t think the question of whether something is ‘sexual’ or affects it’s ethical value. ‘Sex’ per se is not a morally significant category and it seems to me that a moral stance based on such a question is really just an ideological statement about sex, not an ethical argument.
You’re right about children being vulnerable to exploitation, and I am really not supporting the idea that adults should be allowed to treat children as sex partners. My refusal to endorse the blanket prohibition is motivated by it’s being less about protecting children from exploitation and more about asserting a retrograde puritan worldview.
Children naturally seek information about sex from adults and older children and the prohibition you describe criminalizes this process. Even school sex education is condemned as paedophilia is the more extreme discourses. Idiotic I know, but there it is. I direct you to the sacking of Joycelyn Elders.
The data to back up my contention that many pedophiles exist who are sensitive, well-intentioned and have good self-control is simply the corrective measure offsetting the public and media discourse that obsessively markets the opposite assertion. (Although I don’t see what ‘good self-control’ has to do with it, since that would seem redundant in the presence of good intentions.)
the problem is its difficult to challenge the hegemonic order,
when hugely powerful charites have a vested interest in keeping their ideology
dominant.and the majority follow like sheep.
I’ve been thinking lately that the treatment of child-adult sexual relationships is somewhat similar to the treatment of sex work. Thanks to the women’s liberation movement, we are aware of the perennial problem of sexual violence and coercion and we are aware that certain groups, such as children and sex workers, are for obvious reasons more vulnerable to both. So, in an ideal world, how do we deal with this?
Sweden, for one, has made the buying of sex illegal, but not the selling. Many sex workers argue that this doesn’t actually help: it just drives sex work underground and makes sex workers more vulnerable. Here is an extensive collection of critiques of the law: http://www.bayswan.org/swed/swed_index.html It could certainly be argued that children are made more vulnerable, not less, by a legal system which can offer only a blanket condemnation of all adult-child sex and thus drives all such contacts ‘underground’ with legal threats and a heavy stigma. We should instead offer a recognition of a child’s right to bodily self-determination and a condemnation of those circumstances when it’s denied: when a child is badly beaten by a parent, or two children are hauled off to detention centres for consensual sex play with one another, or a fifteen-year-old’s insistence that she was willingly involved with an older man is ignored by courts and counselors alike.
But taking a more pragmatic approach based on harm reduction and the idea of self-determination requires dropping some of the ideology and recognising that sex work and adult-child sex and so forth have always existed and always will exist, and the idea that it’s simply not possible to stamp out adult-child sex entirely is a hard sell in the current climate.
Thanks for this info. Not had change to check it out yet but I will. There’s clearly food for thought here.
[TOC adds: I offered a limited space to Ethan and Nick this time in which to reply here to my blog. The debate has been valuable, I think, but I’d rather not let myself in for moderating the many thousands of further words that might follow if the VPs are allowed a long response and yet more response when there are more replies. Time, soon, to move on, at least for the moment.]
Thanks, Tom, for the opportunity for this dialog. Here are a few key comments to fit in the space allotted (necessarily omitting many possible rebuttals):
1. Tom infers from our “we have no problem with children experimenting sexually with similarly aged peers” that we are content with current policies punishing children for such experimentation. We are in fact outraged by current policies, which we freely say to you, but we don’t waste time and space saying it to the public. Why? Suppose a group of parents starts a movement around the slogan, “Don’t arrest my kindergartner for playing doctor with his pal!” We say, “We’re a group of pedophiles and we agree with you. Can we join your movement?” We would not be welcome! VP starts with the world the way it is, and works on changing things where we think we can have an impact–stigma and access to competent mental health care. We feel that calling out every injustice will be counterproductive because it will prevent us from having an impact on issues where we are most likely to be heard.
2. Our position on harm is that sexual contact between adults and children is not always harmful but that it often is. This is the position of several leading sexologists who are friendly towards pedophiles.
3. We take no position on whether the harm results from iatrogenic factors or intrinsic factors. Some of our members believe the harm is entirely due to iatrogenic factors; others do not. We do not view the distinction as important in determining whether adults should engage in sexual conduct with children. If it turned out that the harm was entirely iatrogenic and societal attitudes changed so there was no iatrogenic harm, we would modify our views. We do not hold out hope that this will occur during any of our lifetimes.
4. Our approach has caused a large number of people to view pedophiles who are committed to avoiding sexual contact with children in a more favorable light. No other approach has had any success and we consider it unlikely that any other approach will have success.
5. We draw no moral distinction between pedophiles who don’t engage in sex with children because they fear iatrogenic harm, intrinsic harm or simply fear incarceration. We believe that adults who have sex with children are acting immorally due to possible harm to the child.
Nick Devin and Ethan Edwards
“If Niebuhr had a fault it was not complacency or fatalistic resignation but an excessive willingness to accommodate the demands of the Gospel to the realities of life in a violent world.”
I am rather pleased you are the one correcting me, Kit. Having accused the VPs of ignorance, they might have given me a real ass-kicking, rather than your very diplomatic one. They may not know much about the research on children’s sexuality but they could well know a lot more theology than I do!
Though this is all tangential, it may be worth observing that not all Christians admire Niebuhr’s ‘Christian realism,’ though his willingness to accommodate the Gospel to the perceived realities of a sinful world has always made him a great favourite with politicians. President Obama has claimed to be an admirer of Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps because he imagines that Niebuhr would adopt a more forgiving attitude towards drone-strikes and extraordinary rendition than Jesus himself might have done.
There is some irony in your observation that Niebuhr’s ‘serenity prayer’ might suggest that “we should leave the heavy lifting to God, whose conspicuous absence from the affairs of man has always seemed, to a non-believer like me, a huge embarrassment for the faithful.” In fact, I would suggest that Niebuhr’s critics – who include Christian pacifists – believe much more strongly that we should “leave the heavy-lifting to God” (or, to put it another way, they have much more confidence in God’s absolute sovereignty over human affairs) than Niebuhr himself did. If Niebuhr had a fault it was not complacency or fatalistic resignation but an excessive willingness to accommodate the demands of the Gospel to the realities of life in a violent world.
As for myself, I don’t belong to the Church of the Virtuous Paedophiles, and any number of things they say annoy me intensely (the denigration of the past and the celebration of our own modern Western amazingness is especially cloying, grateful as I am for second-wave feminism and the contraceptive pill). But just because I think they, like Niebuhr, are willing to make too many concessions and compromises to a fallen world doesn’t mean I don’t wish them well. The fact that I think their methods are mistaken doesn’t mean I don’t think their aim is basically a good one. I do wish them every success. And maybe there’s room for more than one kind of paedophile activism. Who knows? Maybe the Virtuous and the Heretics alike are all working out our own salvation, however unwillingly.
The notion that history is some linear pageant of progress, as Tom says VP suggested, is batshit. Abortion rights have been curtailed in many American states in the last decade, sex workers are treated as crappy as ever, and I’m sure gays living in Russia are just pinching themselves in relation to the progress they’ve made as of late.
And then there’s the increasingly draconian downward spiral that is sex law. We
have gay professors being hunted down for having sex with young men below the age of consent, teachers getting charged with sexual assault for tickling children’s feet, and women getting life sentences for letting boys touch their tits (no, I shit you not; look it up). In addition, as far as social progress in general gos, the picture’s even bleaker for income inequality, with freakish episodes of statistically rare brutality, like rock singers attempting coitus with infants, supplanting analysis in the media of the systemic problems that really matter; as professor Roger Lancaster has noted, “Spectacles of criminal victimization divert attention from the violence of everyday business practices”. And despite all this, the VP people want us to get all 7th Heaven up in this bitch (remember that episode where Lucy got her period? That shit’s classic, yo). Social justice is in a sad state right now, and groups like VP don’t help.
I haven’t posted this to engage in some sparring match with VP, so this will be my last comment under this blog post. I’ve more important things to do, like doing interpretative dances with my cat to Celtic Frost’s “Morbid Tales”– whilst donning a leotard.
[TOC adds: Really sorry, RD for delay in posting this. The technical hitch now appears to have been completely fixed thanks to time generously given by another heretic here who happens to be a computer wizard. I am not going to name him in case he is overwhelmed by other requests for help!]